Twitter is All I Have
The Huffington Post / Mahasti Afshar
14-Sep-2009 (one comment)

In a country in crisis where foreign journalists are banned, local
reporters are jailed, and state media only deliver tabloid news and
propaganda -- but where 31% of the population has access to the
Internet -- social media are a vital source of news, and then some.
Ordinary people are self-training in reporting the facts at
increasingly sophisticated levels.

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"You Are the Media": No despot has ever faced anything like this

by FG on

How ironic and how frustrating for the regime! 

Seeking to keep the Iranian people down, Khamenei's thugs arrests all independent journalists and top aides of opposition leaders.  The hated Supreme Despot then watches as  the people themselves become sophisticated journalists who self-organize their own resistence. Things will never be the same again. 

In some ways its worse than what might have happened if he left journalists and political aides alone.

1. A grass roots movement of this sort is far harder to discredit.

2. Even compared to a normal free media, this social media is far more believable to the masses because it originates with the people.  By contrast the regime continues to undermine its own credibility with tremendous whoppers of the sort I listed in an earlier blog.  By totally underestimating the people's intelligence, the regime undermines itself.

3. The wonderful thing is that nothing can shut off this grass roots social media while every repressive move the regime makes swings more people over to the opposition.  Khamenei is like the legendary King Canute ordering the tide to withdraw.  Except to the degee that everything seems to backfire, it doesn't matter whether Karroubi, Moussavi and others are arrested, or how many newspapers are closed down, or whether demonstrations are broken up with clubs or bloggers put on trial, or how many political prisoners Khamenei succeeds in torturing, raping and murdering.

4. As I've written before, political graffiti must become an important element in this popular social network.  The regime must constantly be reminded of its own total lack of legitimacy, both at home and abroad.   Every crime it commits to discredit itself must be ousted. Let me repeat my own favorite graffiti:  "Khamenei treats his own people worse than Israelis treat Palestinians."